How Trump Can Save the G.O.P.

AS the Republican National Convention nears, there is growing talk of a palace — or party — coup to wrest the nomination from Donald J. Trump, or at least stage a public protest against him.

These Republicans are in denial, and so are the conservative writers and activists egging them on. Their insurrection is likely to fizzle. It also ignores the true problem, and conservatives should thank Mr. Trump for exposing it.

For many years — in fact, for much of its modern history — the G.O.P. has made a fetish of ideological rectitude at the expense of meeting the needs of voters. It is Mr. Trump who is finally addressing their real economic concerns.

Mr. Trump may be an interloper, but he didn’t luck into victory. He obliterated 16 rivals, some of them rising Republican stars, on the way to winning 37 states and building a coalition broad enough to include secular moderates in Massachusetts as well as evangelicals in Mississippi.

The reasons for his success are unmistakable. Consider Mr. Trump’s remarks in Scotland following the Brexit vote. He has been ridiculed, as usual, for his slip-ups, but he also grasped the underlying symbolism of the referendum: its prideful call for national sovereignty and identity, heightened by the pressures of the global economy. “People want to see borders,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t necessarily want people pouring into their country that they don’t know who they are and where they come from.”

Thus did Mr. Trump — the unapologetic nationalist and occasional xenophobe who has said, “America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration” — emerge as a global explainer of the angry populist protests sweeping through many Western democracies.

The sentiments themselves may be disturbing, but they demand attention. Yet few Republicans seem to acknowledge this. A party with a long history of cultural populism — hatred of elites combined with direct appeals to “the forgotten man,” “the silent majority” and “the moral majority” — has grown curiously deaf to the authentic distress still troubling millions who have been struggling in the Obama years. Rather than proposing concrete programs to help the middle class and the poor, the Republicans’ own elite continues to insist that the gravest threat to our economic security comes from government itself.

“When politicians start talking about a brewing ‘crisis’ in the land, most Americans rightly reach for their wallets,” Eric Cantor asserted in “Young Guns,” the campaign manifesto he wrote with Paul D. Ryan and Kevin McCarthy in 2010. These three House leaders criticized Republicans who would “spend the taxpayers’ money like teenagers with their parents’ credit card” as well as Democrats who “never pass up an opportunity to make government bigger and more intrusive.” Legislators in both parties were ignoring the imperatives of “economic freedom” and “limited government.” But what concrete good did these abstractions offer not long after job losses reached almost nine million?

Similar talking points were a staple of the current Republican presidential campaign, with its emphasis on American exceptionalism — such as when Marco Rubio said, over and over, “Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world.” The truth, which Mr. Trump, for all his many shortcomings, squarely recognizes, is that America is already like other Western countries, buffeted by globalization and the aftershocks of the Great Recession.

That was the argument he made recently in western Pennsylvania, when he said free-trade policies were “moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas,” and unless steps are taken “the inner cities will remain poor, the factories will remain closed,” while “the special interests will remain firmly in control.”

Bernie Sanders has made the same case, of course, and Mr. Trump’s pitch to Sanders supporters may offend some conservatives. But a left-right fusion of that kind could help emancipate our stalemated government by giving both parties room for give and take.

That was the route chosen by two former Republican presidents who were also distrusted by conservatives but nonetheless governed effectively from the center. In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower — also, like Mr. Trump, a nonpolitician — epitomized what was then called “me-tooism” by forming a partnership with the Democratic Congress and two ardent New Dealers: the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the House speaker, Sam Rayburn. Together the three accomplished a good deal because they placed results above ideology and partisanship. “The assumption was that the electorate would no longer support a party whose prime goal was negative,” Russell Baker wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1962. Out of this came the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

After Eisenhower, some Republicans pushed the party to the right and toward doctrinal purity. At the party’s nominating convention in 1960, the leader of the conservative faction, Senator Barry Goldwater, suggested doing away with the traditional party platform and replacing it with a “declaration of principles.” Ultimately, Goldwater won that argument, but not immediately.

When Eisenhower’s understudy, Richard M. Nixon, took office in 1969, he oversaw increases in Social Security and Medicare benefits along with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and tighter regulation of the economy. Voters approved, and Nixon converted a narrow victory in 1968 into a historic landslide in 1972.

Later Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush also made compromises with Democratic Congresses. Yet conservatives pushed the party to the right. Goldwater’s vision came to fruition in the 1990s, with the advent of an ideologically disciplined Republican Party, centered in Congress, that has kept its troops in line ever since. But the party has also struggled in presidential elections, capturing the popular vote only once since 1988.

This is the cycle Mr. Trump’s nomination could potentially break. And this threat largely explains the antipathy toward him coming from many establishment Republicans and their intellectual allies. To be fair, some conservatives have objected to genuinely troubling aspects of Mr. Trump’s character and his campaign — in particular, his bigoted remarks about immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims.

These are serious cause for concern, but not, historically, for conservatives, who for many years have exploited racial and ethnic divisions for political gain. Goldwater’s own national campaigns were built on courting Southern segregationists, which he began to do as early as 1961. Ronald Reagan crudely caricatured welfare recipients. Ted Cruz has called for patrolling “Muslim neighborhoods.”

The actual conservative brief against Mr. Trump reflects something else — his rejection, or ignorance, of ideological boilerplate. “He basically never says ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty.’ He gives no indication of caring about the Constitution,” the editor of National Review, Rich Lowry, and a senior editor at the magazine, Ramesh Ponnuru, wrote last October, when it was becoming clear that Mr. Trump was making a strong presidential run. “He has, in short, ignored central and longstanding conservative tenets that seemed to have become only more important in the Tea Party era.”

True enough. But those certitudes don’t begin to address the concerns of the large base of voters who have yet to feel the benefits of the economic recovery. When Mr. Cruz called Mr. Trump “a big-government liberal, just like Barack Obama and just like Hillary Clinton,” he actually touched on a prime cause of Mr. Trump’s wide appeal. He has accurately read the mood of restive voters. The loudest anti-government rhetoric often muffles the urgent cry for more, not less, government. As early as 2010, surveys showed that Tea Party supporters who said they favored smaller government were loath to give up giant programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Recently Mr. Trump has been tacking to the right. His early promise to curtail tax breaks for hedge-fund billionaires (“getting away with murder”) seems to have been smudged over in a tax plan that resembles Mr. Ryan’s supply-side blueprint. But he also presents himself as a negotiator and compromiser who will unlock the frozen gears of government. This has led old-style Republican legislators like Bob Dole and Trent Lott to say they preferred him to the harder-edged Mr. Cruz, with his checklist of “principles.”

The challenge for Mr. Trump will be convincing voters that he really does mean to improve conditions for working-class and middle-class Americans and not just play to their grievances. If he does, and brings the party along with him, he could be a formidable foe to Mrs. Clinton, especially if the email controversy continues to dog her. But even in crushing defeat, he could be a kind of reverse Goldwater who shifts the party closer to the center. Trumpism, if not Mr. Trump himself, might return the party to the pragmatic conservatism of presidents like Eisenhower and Nixon.

Indeed, Nixon could provide the best template. Like Mr. Trump, he ran a polarizing campaign. Its “law and order” message appealed to blue-collar whites who felt menaced on all sides — by civil-rights demonstrators, anti-Vietnam War protesters and liberal intellectuals who seemed disdainful of traditional American values. But Nixon was not an ideologue. He recruited Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, to rethink urban policy. Nixon also guided the nation out of Vietnam, normalized relations with the Soviet Union and opened talks with China.

Might a President Trump show the same flexibility and appetite for pragmatic maneuver? One hopeful sign is something that alarms conservatives: Mr. Trump’s friendly past relations with Democrats. A second is his indifference to hot-button social and cultural issues like transgender bathrooms.

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But there is also the Mr. Trump who seems to float in a bubble of self-regard, the intemperate and blustering bully, the counter-wonk who seems unversed in the most basic policy debates, the rabble-rouser who was slow to disown racists. That Donald Trump might give us an administration all too similar to Trump University and the Trump Institute, a destructive exercise in branding.

Years of fossilized ideology on the right created this choice, and some conservatives admit it, though it has not made them happy. Mr. Trump’s nomination will mean the demise of “a conservative party as a constant presence in U.S. politics,” the columnist George F. Will warned in December. (Mr. Will has since announced he will quit the G.O.P. and seek asylum among the “unaffiliated.”)

Whatever the outcome in November, this reckoning may be exactly what the party needs. Mr. Trump seemed to say as much in May, as he was closing in on the nomination. “This is called the Republican Party,” he said. “It’s not called the Conservative Party.”

Sam Tanenhaus is a former editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of “The Death of Conservatism.”